“If wits were pins, the man would be a veritable hedgehog.”

“Sylvester Graham, he of the eponymous health-food cracker, claimed that a man who could make it to the age of thirty without giving in to the temptations of his sexual urges would be a veritable god.”

“Some man would come to her room. Maybe she would hesitate, and he'd grab her, pin her to the mattress, force her to cooperate.”

“But that was Isabelle — if there was a boy around and blame that needed to be pinned on someone, Isabelle would pin it on him”

“The priest therefore saw what the anchorite could not. That God needs no witness. Neither to himself nor against. The truth is rather that if there were no God then there could be no witness for there could be no identity to the world but only each man's opinion of it. The priest saw that there is no man who is elect because there is no man who is not. To God every man is a heretic.”

“They walked as it were in a black vapour wrought of veritable darkness itself that, as it was breathed, brought blindness not only to eyes but to the mind, so that even the memory of colours and of forms and of any light faded out of thought. Night had always been, and always would be, and night was all.”